Anita (Amethyst's init)

This is an init program designed to work specifically for Amethyst Linux. It doesn't manage services; it uses perp to do that instead. It may be feasable to make Anita use another service manager in the future, if there's a demand for it.

Aside from starting perp, Anita will mount certain special filesystems, and it can mount a filesystem on /etc and /var, either directly or as an overlay. With Anita you can shutdown, reboot, or halt the system, as well as an Amethyst-specific option I'm calling 'apremount', which is to remount the root filesystem with a new set of packages using apm. apremount is effectively equivalent to a reboot, except without actually rebooting and having to reload the kernel, which makes things way faster if all you want to do is update your packages.

I still have a bit more testing to do with Anita, but as far as I can tell it's feature-complete. I could add some documentation too, though there isn't that much to document. (Well, I guess I should document the kernel command line options it uses... but the initramfs also uses several of those parameters too. I think I just want to document the kernel options all in one place.)

Anita is written in C. Its only dependencies are a C library and the linux kernel headers.

You can always download the latest version of Anita from here. For historical purposes (e.g. if you want to see the process of making it), you can find older versions in the downloads directory. I would only recommend using the latest version.

Note: For some weird reason, if you download it from firefox, civetweb is re-compressing the already-compressed tar.gz files. I don't know why this is, but for now you can work around it by decompressing it with gunzip twice. Alternatively, download it with wget or curl.